SC|04 Report

Haven't posted for a few days since they've cut the attendees off from the conference center and consequently free wireless access, presumably for the bandwidth challenge. Over the past three days, we've been talking to a number of vendors to see what needs to be done to build a HPC center at UTD. I've also been talking to various labs to see what people have been doing in as far as combining HPC and biology (for my work at UT-Southwestern); a lot of work is being done on molecular dynamics problems as well as whole genome work, but nothing seems to be immediately useful for the lab (which is currently involved in SNP association studies as part of the Dallas Heart Study). On the upside, a potential collaboration may be in the works.

There also seems to be a great deal of work being done on grid network and services. This concept of distributed computing seems to provide an attractive solution for providing HPC services although I'm not entirely clear on how a consistent business model could be built around it. Government funded systems I can see, but how a company could make money by directly paying for grid services is something I can't.

Day three (Wednesday) was fairly interesting. I attended a talk regarding the making of Shrek 2 and the influence of HPC on the animation industry. It's amazing the amount of work that goes into producing a single shot - not just in terms of raw computing power, but also the amount of thought that goes into mixing real and cartoon physics. For example, the number of layers and simulation needed to animate rain falling and scattering off objects.

Moreover, day three had one hell of a party. First, the Apple folks brought us over to the Omni William Penn Hotel for a "brainwashing" session, i.e., presentations trying to convince us (and fairly convincingly) that Apple can be and is a player in the HPC market. Then came the SGI party. We (Aidan and I) traded in our casino "money" for extra tickets and proceeded to be a little inebriated. This was clearly not an academic conference, with all that free food and booze.

Day four was just a "clean up" session. Visited a few remaining booths, picked up some extra goodies, and then attended a last party for the technical conference attendees. Also, got to see and play around with Blue Gene, which is currently rated as the fastest supercomputer in the world; much fun there.

Finally, Wanda Sykes had a good comment on Leno Tuesday night: "You had to cheer for Bush [in the last election]; otherwise, it would be like booing at the Special Olympics."

Anyways, sitting in Pittsburgh International fairly tipsy and I'm about to board my plane to head back to Dallas. More later.